Isabelle Faust on Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto (14 min.)

Alban Berg dedicated his violin concerto “To the Memory of an Angel”, to Manon Gropius, the daughter of Alma Mahler, who died in the spring of 1935 at the age of only 18. “I do not attempt … to find the words where language fails by letter,” Berg wrote to Alma Mahler, “but yet: one day … may you hear in the Violin Concerto that which I feel today and cannot express”. In May 2011, violinist Isabelle Faust performed the work together with the Berliner Philharmoniker and Claudio Abbado. In our interval discussion, she answers questions from the musicologist and journalist Margarete Zander.